ABSTRACT
Like cubism, where different images may be considered in a somewhat expressionistic manner, the development of the layered data analysis that this book provides has the potential to offer a detailed construction of the complexity and perplexity of the performed and self-constructed fundamentalist Christian identity, while also detailing a genealogy of resistance. In this chapter, I will introduce the research participants through brief biographies then provide three descriptions of their plotlines of identity formation and re-formation. The enquiry is undertaken into what kind of a story, or stories, each narrator places herself or himself (Silverman, 2011: 82). That is, in relation to their specifi c church context, how do the narrators story and then re-story who they were and who they now are ? This is understood not in the sense of a portal into their essentialised selves, but as subjective unfi nalised accounts told ‘at an historical moment with its circulating discourses and power relations’ (Riessman, 2008: 8) to me as the interviewer. The story of themselves, or narrative selfhood, is set against the background of the stories that the (church) culture makes available to them (Frank, 2010: 199), which ultimately shifts for them throughout time.
